A quick-hit international adventure led by a Yank full of bravado.
In this fourth installment of Yocum’s thriller series, a former CIA operative comes out of retirement to track down a missing undercover agent in Australia.
Former CIA investigator Dennis Cunningham is enjoying early retirement in Western Australia with his girlfriend, Judy White, an Australian Federal Police investigator. One night, at a supposedly social dinner, Judy’s superior offers Dennis a job: $500,000 to find David Chu, a missing Chinese agent whom Australian intelligence had been keeping tabs on. Dennis is reluctant but decides that he can’t turn down good money, and he stipulates that Judy must be his intermediary. The investigation starts off rocky when Dennis senses Australian agents aren’t telling the whole truth, and he doesn’t like being handled.The situation darkens when he receives a threatening note and is beaten by a mysterious assailant in a parking lot after meeting with an old CIA friend. As Dennis traipses across Australia and even to the States to sniff out leads, he must temper his brashness with caution, as it turns out that finding Chu may be just the tip of an iceberg of conspiracies. Yocum’s series entry, following Valley of Spies (2019), freshens the American thriller genre with an Australian tinge. For instance, Dennis’ no-holds-barred approach satisfyingly contrasts with that of his by-the-book Australian contacts. Judy is also sharply drawn as a smart, underestimated cop, and a harrowing side plot involving her son, Trevor, shows her vulnerability. Much like Dennis, Yocum’s prose is straightforward, though some of the dialogue is awkwardly expository: “Dennis, would you stop punishing yourself about the past with your daughter? Your wife died many years ago. Let’s not open that can of worms.” Dennis’ virile-hero bit also strikes a sour note sometimes, with multiple mentions of how “attractive” he finds a colleague. Still, it’s an entertaining globe-trotter of a plot, complete with stakeouts, standoffs, and acerbic banter: “No, I did not beat the shit out of you in the parking lot,” says one of Dennis’ Aussie colleagues at one point, “But I wish the hell I had.”
A quick-hit international adventure led by a Yank full of bravado.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2022
ISBN: 979-8985534528
Page Count: 410
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Better set aside several uninterrupted hours for this toxic rocket. You’ll be glad you did.
A successful Vermont podcaster who’s elicited confessions from dozens of criminals finds herself on the other side of the table, in the hottest of hot seats, over her own troubled past.
Poe Webb was only 13 when she saw her mother, Margaret McMillian, get stabbed to death by the man she’d picked up for a quickie. Poe had vowed revenge, but how could a kid find and avenge herself on a stranger who’d vanished as quickly as he appeared? In the long years since then, Poe’s made a name for herself as a top true-crime podcaster who routinely invites her guests to tell her audience exactly what they did. Now, she’s being pressed, and pressed hard, by Ian Hindley, whose fake name echoes those of England’s Moors Murderers, to join him in a livestream her fans will find riveting because, as Hindley tells her, he’s actually Leopold Hutchins, the pickup who stabbed her mother 14 times when she failed to use her safe word. Skeptical? Hindley knows endless details about the killing that were never released by the police. If Poe won’t do the broadcast, Hindley threatens to harm everyone she loves: her father; her producer and lover, Kip Nguyen; and her black Lab, Bailey. And there’s one more complication that makes the pressure on Poe even more unbearable. Seven years ago, against all odds, she succeeded in tracking Leopold Hutchins from Burlington to New York and killing him herself. In fact, it’s that murder that Hindley most wants her to talk about. Which bully is more fearsome, the man who’s threatening her or the man she killed?
Better set aside several uninterrupted hours for this toxic rocket. You’ll be glad you did.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9781464226229
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
Perhaps the single most striking feature of this latest dose of intrigue is that its title is intended to be taken literally.
The eternal jostling for power in Rome and the Vatican is juiced by a development that attracts the attention of the Magellan Billet and its foremost alumnus, Cotton Malone.
Eric Gaetano Casaburi, secretary of Italy’s National Freedom Party, anticipates a decisive victory for the party if Sergio Cardinal Ascolani, the Vatican’s secretary of state, will lend his full-throated support. Of course, the Church isn’t supposed to meddle in contemporary politics, but Eric makes an offer he doesn’t think Ascolani can refuse. Five hundred years ago, Giuliano di Lorenzo de’ Medici loaned Pope Julius II ten million florins the Church never repaid. That debt is still legally payable to anyone who proves to be a surviving member of the Medici family, and Eric believes he can prove exactly that. Although Malone, called in to investigate the bona fides of Ascolani’s enemy Jason Cardinal Richter, has already found a fortune hidden in Richter’s apartment, Richter swears that he’s being framed, and the violent deaths of three anonymous functionaries seem to bear him out. So, Malone forges a series of alliances with Richter, with wealthy businesswoman Camilla Baines, and ultimately with an even more surprising party to prevent Ascolani and Thomas Dewberry, a hired assassin who’s both a sociopath and a devout Catholic, from swaying the upcoming election in return for Eric’s forgiving the ancient debt. An extended closing note shows how inventively Berry mingled history and fiction to weave this tangled web. Readers invested in learning more about the Medicis can be assured that the brief glimpse of them in a prologue set in 1512 is only the beginning.
Perhaps the single most striking feature of this latest dose of intrigue is that its title is intended to be taken literally.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781538770566
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
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